Connie and Mike Cone restored and renovated their 19th-century town house in Philadelphia over a 12-year period. We spoke with them for the Winter 2021 issue of Preservation magazine; here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Connie: Rittenhouse Square is beautiful, and it’s close to the Academy of Music [a performing arts building owned by the Philadelphia Orchestra]. I grew up in the New York City suburbs and went into the city all the time, and it reminded me of that.

Mike: The house is in a historic district. We are reasonably certain it was built in 1868. The Quaker mentality is very strong in Philadelphia. You go into these houses, and the exterior is perfectly plain, and then you walk in and the house just explodes. It’s the Quaker ideal of a beautiful soul and a plain exterior.

When you walk in the front door, you can see 118 feet up to the window on the second floor, and the whole house springs in front of you. I think Matthew Semple, who bought the house in 1895 and renovated it, was trying to show off a little bit. His architect, John T. Windrim, added the marble to the facade and designed the staircase you see today.

Connie: We really liked the bones of the house. It had space for a garden, which Mike wanted, and off-street parking, which I was intent on. It was a pretty quick decision on our part. We’d lived in six different places over the years and loved the idea of changing everything to live in this house—even our furniture, so it looked right in a house with high ceilings and paneling. But we knew it was going to involve a serious renovation.

Mike: All the staircases and the paneling up to the third floor were there from 1895. The staircase from the third to fourth floor was also intact, and I think it’s from 1868. The two formal rooms on the second floor—the music room and the sitting room—and the third-floor guest room are pretty much as they are today. But the rest of the house had been destroyed between the 1920s and the 1990s.

Connie: I went to the local AIA [American Institute of Architects] office, where they had notebooks on a number of architects in town. We interviewed three different architects. Daniela Voith of Voith & Mactavish was the third, and we hit it off immediately. She had done a fair number of residential properties, and she wasn’t trying to take a historic house and strip it out and turn it into a Philip Johnson Glass House or something.

We needed a library, and a better kitchen with a professional stove and hood for entertaining. We knew we had to rip out the small, dark kitchen on the first floor, replace the garage, and design a brand-new garden. The dining room was oddly shaped and nothing lined up—the chandelier didn’t line up with the fireplace, or with the room itself.

Mike: We wanted to retain those parts of the historic fabric that were retainable and restore the rest of the house to be like them. And we wanted the bathrooms and the two kitchens to be as modern as possible. We thought if they were very contemporary-looking, then you wouldn’t notice any inconsistencies in the restoration and think, “Well, this is not really how it would have been in 1895.”

Connie: We did the renovation in three phases over about a dozen years, which gave us time to review the plans over and over again. We wanted to make sure that when we went to hire a contractor, the plans were rock solid. It was really expensive, so we didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew. We looked for and bought historical fireplace mantelpieces, antique coal grates, and antique hardware for the doors. All of that takes time.